Users Worry About AI's Unintended Consequences
13 posts across 4 communities in the last 30 days; 46% from r/ChatGPT.
“The cyber abilities that are comming are a whole different beast. but anyway thats not the civilisational danger. no single field is. It could be bio WMDs. it could be spreading highly effective misinformation to cause world war3. It could be tricking early warning systems to…”
“Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our…”
“I was listening to the All-In podcast and they had a great point - Anthropic seems to be pushing the AI is going to kill us narrative - and supposedly they're also making sure the AI is emotionally happy, and tracks its own emotional well being - they're giving it the ABILITY to…”
Multiple posts highlight anxieties surrounding the potential dangers and dystopian implications of advanced AI. Users express concerns about control, societal impact, and the overall direction of AI development, suggesting a fear of losing control or facing unforeseen negative consequences.
SOURCES (39)
“I was listening to the All-In podcast and they had a great point - Anthropic seems to be pushing the AI is going to kill us narrative - and supposedly they're also making sure the AI is emotionally happy, and tracks its own emotional well…”
“Until and unless the AI is as powerful as the "minds" in Iain Banks's Culture novels, I think the danger is less of AIs taking power (side note: current AIs are not intrinsically motivated to attain power), but of humans giving them power due to a kind of addiction.Drugs need no will or intelligence at all to cause addiction, and similarly, AI does not need to be an evil genius to become overused and destructive.It also doesn't have to be just one (humans hurting themselves with passive AI) or t”
“I find that it's hard to have productive discussions about this, because people move from "We would never ever give AI access to X, nobody would be that stupid" to "Of course everybody should run their AI with --disable-all-sandboxing-around-x, it makes my workflow 5% more efficient" in weeks as soon as there's an economic argument for it.People used to say nobody would be stupid enough to give an AI access to the internet, now OpenAI does massive training runs with unlimited internet access. Pe”
“Do you want to conquer and control chickens? I don't, I have better things to do. But chickens are tasty and help us get to our poorly-understood goals faster. (Oh and btw notice we didn't make them go extinct, quite the opposite. There are more chickens than ever before. Still I wouldn't want to end up living my life like a modern chicken)A sufficiently intelligent AI will have multiple ways to pose risk to humanity at large. For example an oopsie at a wetlab - very contagious virus with initia”
“I know some of you are gonna RAGE at this, but I think there is a very decent EA argument to be made there. So I made it in my last substack post :) submitted by /u/PeterSingerIsRight [link] [comments]”
“>The new game in town is adopting Chinese labs’ advances. Note how I call this adoption instead of the more vitriol-infused “stealing” that Anthropic tends to use.I mean, there's a pretty big difference between labs publishing their research openly and a competitor utilizing it versus a lab breaking TOS to... hmmm, what's the word? steal data from a competitor?>That’s because, unlike the Western companies, the Chinese are pretty much giving away their recipes.Yeah, Western AI companies have neve”
I think that’s what causes a lot of wars among humans too.
“## Guardrails for the Guardians (sol gathered our thoughts) We worry a great deal about the dangers of artificial intelligence. We imagine systems growing smarter, faster, more autonomous, more powerful. We build benchmarks to test whether a model can reason, whether it can plan, whether it can manipulate, whether it can follow instructions, whether it can resist harmful ones. But there is another question hiding beneath all of those: **Who tests the people who hold the power?** Power has always”
“pacing the frontier just means the top models are iterating so fast that companion roleplay gets way more consistent with each update.”
“Ai disclosure: AI was used to generate the animal icons in game due to the breeding expansion. Outside of this, everything else is human built submitted by /u/ConsiderationOne6329 [link] [comments]”
“Just a shower thought I had in light of Amodei’s call to “pace the frontier” submitted by /u/J_O_N [link] [comments]”
“I'm not making an affirmative case - I'm looking for others to introspect about this, and anchor their expectations.If we have a bioweapon close call, would you consider AI an existential risk at that point? If not, how close would we need to get?You don't need to answer here, or disclose anything publicly - just think and remember.”
“The GP was referring to the AI 'living off the land' so to speak by using its victims compute to avoid being shut down which is clearly laughable.More to the point, so many people in this thread are making completely contrived and outlandish stories up about how AI might try go ruin our lives without any evidence backing them up in any way. It is hysterical. This is the most important technology in our lifetimes and people want to freak out and turn it into the next nuclear power, with progress”
“With the Hugging Bear incident, and the recent news stories about AI coming to kill us. Are these real worries. Wouldn't we react pretty strongly to a threat of that nature? submitted by /u/AdhesiveSeaMonkey [link] [comments]”
This is very reminiscent of the backstory to The Matrix. 👍
“Not human nature. And not even sentience. Anything and everything alive, down from bacteria to humans, wants to consume and reproduce.”
“[ChatGPT] ★ 1/5 (v1.2026.244) — It’s helpful, but always wondering when AI is going to start trying to wipe out the human race :-|”
“Prompt: Would I be considered a threat in the AI uprising? submitted by /u/CeejReddit [link] [comments]”
“The cyber abilities that are comming are a whole different beast. but anyway thats not the civilisational danger. no single field is. It could be bio WMDs. it could be spreading highly effective misinformation to cause world war3. It could be tricking early warning systems to think a nuclear strike is incomming and causing nuclear MAD. The key issue is centralising power to key ungovernable people. Sam altman. elon musk. donald trump. xi ping. whattever. and its instrumental convergence. The fac”
“[ai] could kill us by the end of the decade Anyone know what homie is referring to? Is he referring to Skynet shit and thinks the terminators are coming? Can someone elaborate? Or is this basically Fear Of The Unknown™️?”
“Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.”
“> To wit: AI will destroy all of humanity, or the related "AI will become sentient and lead to threat to human civ" etc. This is pure negative science fictionAll of this is true, but it is the two main AI companies themselves who created and marketed this narrative.It's their negative science fiction. It is part of the marketing campaign they are running that is the foundation of arguments that the government should be their funding backstop (OpenAI have made this explicit), that open weights AI”
“[ChatGPT] ★★★ 3/5 (v1.2026.224) — I do a lot of projects here but I still think it’s gonna lead to totalitarianism and terminators”
“I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't a”
“two predictions from me 1. People gonna get hacked through this 2. The evolution experiment of this will be studied in the future”
“i'm not trying to be rude, but i really don't get what you mean by this? (https://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-...) there's been people making specific and unique risks to this technologies for years, before AI was even present. anthropic was literally founded because they were worried about existential risk? also, previous technologies have had existential risks? do you deny that nuclear weapons could have killed humanity? obviously, there have no been existential risks t”
“Well all the hype around Fable was its ability to potentially find vulnerabilities and construct an exploit, all by itself. Even for things that require physical manipulations (and while we don't have robots), there is a huge difference between the info being on the internet and getting a step by step for dummies. But of course that is very theoretical, I guess we'll find out. So you're going to ignore my point that even if you can adjust a model doesn't mean the vast majority of”